Ardour on Windows (Spring 2015)

People have asked about Ardour on Windows for many years, and
thanks to funding by Google, Harrison Consoles and Waves
Audio, and work by Tim Mayberry, John Emmas, Robin Gareus,
Grygorii Zharun and Valeriy Khaminsky, it is now possible to
use Ardour on that platform.

Possible, but not supported

However, at the present time (Spring 2015) there are and will
be no official releases of Ardour for
Windows. Our nightly
build site will continue to have both 32 and 64 bit builds
for Windows XP and all later versions. But there is no
support for these builds. Moreover, because
these are nightly builds, from time to time they may break
horribly. The nightly site allows people to test out the
latest version of ardour, but our official releases are the
only ones we can recommend for actual work.

Our support philosophy

We'd love to see Ardour running on Windows more and more, but
there's a problem. We don't want to just give Windows users
the ready-to-run version of Ardour and then cast them
aside. We'd like to offer them the same personable, timely
support that users on Linux and OS X have received for
years. The problem is that the existing Ardour developers and
community cannot do this. We do not have the time or expertise
to assist Windows users with Windows-specific problems.

Maybe you can help!

So, we're looking for a new community of users who are willing and
capable of bootstrapping a support environment for Ardour on
Windows. You will be able to replicate any parts of the existing
online infrastructure that we use - web sites, forums, IRC channels,
mailing lists - in any way you wish (without any costs). But there
will need to be people around who will answer questions in whatever
online channels you establish, enough people to cover a significant
part of the world's timezones. People who will respond in a timely
manner to email and web forum questions. You know the rest.

Do I get paid for helping with support?

In exchange for this, we can discuss how you can get some
slice of whatever extra income we receive from Windows
users. I don't have any firm numbers in mind yet, and it is
far from clear how much extra income there will be. All we
know for sure is that Ardour on Windows will be a LOT more
successful if users on that platform have interested,
personable, helpful and timely support.

What's the end goal?

Ideally, it would be a group of 3-4 people with spread-out
timezones and/or personal time habits. You don't need to know
a lot about Ardour itself - general questions that are not
platform specific are things we can handle with our existing
support infrastructure - but you do need to understand
installation, device usage and other platform-specific issues
that can arise when using Ardour on Windows. If you're
interested, please join
the ardour-dev
mailing list and send us a message. There is also already
an #ardour-windows
IRC
channel on Freenode where you can discuss this with anyone
else who is interested..

Let's do this!

If enough of you can step up and get coordinated, we can make
the Windows build official releases and help make Ardour on
Windows a useful reality for lots of people.

Developer Information

Ardour is written and built with entirely cross-platform tools
and technology. We do not use native IDE's on any platform to
build the program. On all platforms, we use some version of
the GNU C compiler (gcc on linux, Apple gcc on OS X and
mingw/gcc on Windows).

We welcome the involvement of any experienced Windows
developers in Ardour's continued progress, but please do not
expect to find a project that can be built/managed using (for
example) Visual C++. We do not have the resources to manage
multiple build systems, and frankly prefer the lean, fully
accessible system we use now (waf). You are obviously free to
use whatever code editing tools you want, but ultimately code
must conform to our style guide.